Moorish Science Temple of America

Virtually every religion has some sort of memorable origin story,
something that explains why this particular religion is so much
superior to all of the other options available
to today's discriminating consumer.

Some stories are more memorable than others. Case in point: The
Moorish Science Temple of America, which surpasses even
Scientology and Thelema in sheer
weirdness.

Moorish Science was established in 1913 by a man who was born with
the name Timothy Drew. Moorish Science may have the distinction of
being the only religion ever to be founded in Newark, NJ. Similar to
Christian Science, Moorish Science has
nothing to do with science, although it does have a lot to do with
Moorishness.

The basic tenet of Moorish Science is that all black people are
descended from the Moors, a nomadic North African tribe whose most
famous member was Othello. The Moors were Islamic when they first
invaded Spain in 711; thus
Moorish Science teaches that all blacks are originally Islamic.
"Islamic" is being used very loosely
here, as most other Muslims would tell you. The actual creeds of
Moorish Science draw nearly as much from Buddhism,
Christianity and Freemasonry as they do from Islam.

If you're thinking that this premise is somewhat questionable,
well, let's consider the historical record. Islam was founded in the
7th century A.D. Black people have been around since before the dawn
of recorded history, which goes back to about 30,000 B.C. But logic
has never been much of an obstacle to religion.

Timothy Drew was born in 1886 in North Carolina. According to some
accounts, he was born to two former slaves, then adopted by a local
tribe of Cherokee Indians. Another telling of the story says his
father was a dark-skinned Cherokee himself. Yet another version of
the tale says his father was Moroccan Muslim and his mother was the
Cherokee. Drew himself said the moment of his birth was marked by an
eclipse; others claimed an earthquake heralded his arrival on the
scene.

Whatever his parentage, young Timothy apparently joined the circus
as a stage magician at age 16 and/or hooked up with a band
of Gypsies. Some or all of these characters took Drew on a world
tour that would change his life.

The most fateful jaunte in Drew's alleged travels was to Egypt
in the early 1900s. While there, he supposedly met the high priest of
an ancient Egyptian magic cult. The priest saw Drew as the
reincarnation of the cult's original leader from centuries ago (or so the
story goes) and initiated Drew into the powerful magic
rituals of yore.

The priest also imparted to Drew a "director's cut"
version of the Koran, which became known as the Circle Seven Koran.
The young circus performer rechristened himself "Noble Drew Ali,
the Prophet" and returned to the U.S. to spread the good word.

The Circle Seven Koran was largely based on apocryphal Christian
texts that said Jesus Christ, considered an important prophet by
conventional Islam, traveled to India, where he lived most of his
first thirty years, with side trips to Africa and Europe.

If you could wade through the florid language of the Noble Drew's
writings, you would find that the church was generally oriented
around a series of elaborate racial theories, leavened with a healthy
dose of Masonic-style occultism.

The centerpiece of the Moorish Science church was an elaborate and
scientifically dubious set of theories regarding racial origins. The
religion was the first recognizable iteration of the Black Power
movement in America, but the structure of the religion was accepting
of all races. Drew rejected the appellation of "negro", and
said that American blacks were properly referred to as Moors, or
Moorish Americans. One of his disciples was Elijah Mohammed, the
founder of the Nation of Islam.

Drew taught that the Moors were an "asiatic race", as
were many whites, whom he identified as Celts or Persians. Although the
Moorish Temple began as a primarily Moorish organization, Drew soon
began to attract significant numbers of Persians, who were welcomed
into the fold.

Although the Circle Seven Koran has some of the typical bad things you would expect about the Jews, the Moorish Temple was relatively silent on the issue. Despite the fact that the Temple was open to "Persians," the book was quite specific on the racial issues at play in the story of Christ's crucifixion:

Jesus himself was of the true blood of the ancient Canaanites and Moabites and the inhabitants of Africa. Seeking to redeem His people in those days from the pale skin nations of Europe, Rome crucified Him according to their law.

While this was one of the more openly controversial claims in the Circle Seven, the main thrust of the Temple's teachings had less to do with the evils of Jews and European whites than the origins of blacks. As Moors, Drew argued, all blacks were originally Muslims. (As were many whites whose race derived from the so-called asiatic strains.) Drew said that Moor empowerment could
only be found through a return to Islam.

But Noble Drew's definition
of Islam didn't bear much resemblance to what you might hear from a
mullah at al-Azhar University. Drew taught that Morocco was the promised land of the Bible and
the Koran, symbolizing a state of illuminated
consciousness that was obtained through a hodge-podge of occultist
and eastern mystical practices.

The combination of ideas was sort of
a Moorish spin on the European trend of theosophism, a 19th century
movement that believed all religions are basically describing the
same thing in different words. Critics of the Temple leveled charges
of antinomianism against the sect's members, but
the allegations weren't any more true than the 500 previous times
someone had used that word to describe a religion they didn't like.

He drew on Buddhism and indigenous religions to guide a practice
that employed the terminology of Islam, but he structured the Moorish
Temple on a Masonic blueprint, including a version of their charter
and initiation procedures. A Moorish Temple charter was modeled after
a Masonic lodge charter:

Jurisdiction aforesaid by virtue of whose
authority it exists, while acting in conformity with the laws, rules
and regulations of the Home Temple and the said subordinate Temple
aforesaid, being duly and lawfully organized, constituted and
established, is hereby authorized and empowered to initiate and
confer the degrees of said Temple in accordance with the established
forms and usages upon all such persons as are duly and lawfully
qualified. To promote and practice the teachings of all the true and
divine prophets: Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius, Etc.

The officers and members who benefit under this charter, do hereby pledge
themselves to act at all times in obedience to the commands and
edicts of the illustrious Noble Drew Ali, the founder and head of the
Moorish Holy Temple of Science, Inc.

The actual theology of the church was virtually non-existent, and
what little there was had a tendency to drift alarmingly. Overall,
the church was in favor of love and racial pride. Its metaphysical
teachings sounded a lot more like Taoism than Islam.

"Man is a thought of Allah; all thoughts of
Allah are infinite; they are not measured up by time, for things that
are concerned with time begin and end. [...] But man, like every
other thought of Allah, was but a seed, a seed that held within
itself the potencies of Allah, just as the seed of any plant of earth
holds deep within itself the attributes of every part of that
especial plant."

Temple teachings about the life of Christ featured such
non-standard biblical scenes as Jesus facing off against Apollo for
the title of "undisputed legitimate god," with Jesus as the
decisive victor. The Greek gods return later to watch over his tomb
before the resurrection. Standards for behavior were generally
modeled on Islam, but not rigorously, and disciples were expected to
undertake a journey of self-exploration that had a decidedly
gnostic flavor.

Members of the Moorish Temple were required to wear a fez; Noble
Drew sported a Cherokee feather in his. They often added "Bey"
or "-El" to their names, which was meant to signify Moorish
descent, and members of the church could aspire to a variety of
initiated titles such as Deacon, Exilarch or Papessa. The church used
a flag that featured a variation of the Islamic crescent and star
insignia.

The Moorish Temple and its followers refused to fight in World War
I, but this was an age when the phrase "uppity negro" caused more trouble for the person it was directed at than the person who uttered it. More than 20 years before Rosa Parks, New Jersey didn't take kindly to all these Moors suddenly
taking pride in their race and refusing to consider themselves second
class citizens. Under intense pressure, the Moorish Temple decided it was time to move on.

Drew took the church to Chicago, where he had a stronger base of
street-level support. In fiery speeches on the streets of the Windy
City, he exhorted Moors to reject the white man's labels, such as
negro, black and colored. The church did a brisk business in a
variety of "Moorish" products, including various snake-oil
style ointments, teas and other paraphernalia. He issued his
followers "passports" to the Moorish Nation of America. He
urged Americans of every color to reject hate and embrace love,
proclaiming that Chicago would become the new Mecca.

As history has proven time and again, promoting love instead of
hate is one of the most reliable ways to ensure an early death.

As the scrutiny of the Chicago police increased, the
Moorish Church schismed when a member of the Temple,
Claude Green, declared himself Grand Sheik and took a number of Noble
Drew's followers along with him. The split quickly became extremely
acrimonious, and a short time later, Green was stabbed to death by
parties unknown.

Drew was arrested, beaten by police, and released on bond pending
an indictment. A couple of weeks later, he died. The exact
circumstances around his death are as unknown as those surrounding
his birth. His body was buried in a Chicago graveyard.

After Drew's death, the Moorish Temple continued, but it had lost
much of its fervor. The split among Drew's followers sharpened, and a
series of gun battles and kidnappings erupted over the question of
who would succeed him. One contender claimed to be the reincarnation
of Noble Drew, a good trick since he was a fully grown adult when
Drew died. Another claimed to hold Drew's secret last will and
testament, which conveniently designated him to take over the Temple.

During the 1950s, the remaining Moorish disciples found additional reasons to look elsewhere for their spiritual succor, when the Temple's activities drew the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Suspecting the Moors of collaborating with the Japanese (what with all this "asiatic" stuff), the FBI opened a file
on the organization and started trying to infiltrate. By the time the
FBI finally dropped its investigation of the Temple years later,
its file on Moorish Science had swelled to more than 3,000 pages.

Although Moorish Science continues today, in the form of various
splinter groups each claiming the true succession of the Moorish
ideal, the Temple was largely obscured by the rise of the Nation of
Islam, which had sprung directly from one of the splinters.

Many Moorish followers turned to the Nation of Islam during the
1940s and 1950s, or to traditional Islam, a movement which started to
gather steam around the 1970s. One such convert, Clement Rodney
Hampton-El, gained notoriety when he later became an al Qaeda-linked terrorist known as Dr. Rashid. Today, there aren't
enough Moorish followers to show up in a demographic study. The total
number is estimated at somewhere between a couple hundred and tens of
thousands (a generous estimate).

Barring a particularly colorful second coming by Noble Drew Ali,
Moorish Science is probably destined to become a historical footnote.
But thanks to the FBI's extensive documentation of the sect's every
move, no matter how trivial, Moorish Science will at least be an
extraordinarily well-documented footnote, and that counts for
something.